As the number of wireless cellular data communication devices continues to increase and as their data capabilities continue to be more and more heavily used, the demands on available infrastructure and frequencies continue to increase. The addition of infrastructure to meet demand is costly, and is becoming more and more difficult as unoccupied space suitable for placement of larger base stations diminishes. In addition, as saturation of available wireless communication frequencies approaches, addition of conventional infrastructure approaches a point of ineffectiveness.
In order to support the growing demand for data communication services, therefore, network operators are turning more and more to managing existing resources, particularly frequency resources, so as to increase the number of users served by the resources. Traditionally, users have been served by deployments of larger base stations, with each base station defining and providing radio coverage to one or more cells which constitute a relatively wide area. In networks configured according to third generation partnership project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) standards, such a larger base station may be implemented as a macro eNodeB (eNB) and may define one or more macro cells. One approach to increasing the number of users that may be served is the deployment of smaller, lower power base stations, which in a 3GPP LTE system may be implemented as a home eNB (HeNB) or femtocell, and typically define one cell, although more than one cell is also possible.
Numerous HeNBs (for example, in third generation partnership project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) or LTE-advanced (LTE-A) networks) may be deployed by homes and businesses, which direct traffic in their vicinity to an Internet connection. In addition, cellular network operators may themselves deploy HeNBs in the vicinity of a macro eNB, to take on traffic that would otherwise be supported by the macro eNB. Dense deployment of HeNBs can substantially increase the capacity by allowing the reuse of frequencies within a macro cell.